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WILLIA>fLAUD 

Archbishop of Canterbury, and Martyr 



A LECTURE 

Delivered before the Students of the General 

Theological Seminary, New York, 

February 6, 1912 



BY 

The REV. LUCIUS WATERMAN, D.D. 



Published by the Students 
1912 



WILLIAM LAUD 

Archbishop of Canterbury, and Martyr 



A LECTURE 

Delivered before the Students of the General 

Theological Seminary, New York, 

February 6, 1912 



BY 

The REV. LUCIUS WATERMAN, D.D. 



Prom the Library of the 

General Theological Seminary of the 
Protestant Episcopal Church. 
Chelsea Square, Hew York City. 



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V 



Gift 



12 JUL »2 






NOTE 

This Lecture was written in its original form about the time of 
the Laud Commemoration (250 years from the Archbishop's death) 
in January, 1895. The writer had no opportunity to make use of the 
valuable books and papers which that Commemoration drew out, 
and can only suggest them here. His own sources were more par- 
ticularly the following: 

Laud's Diary, passim. 

Laud's "Troubles and Trial." 

Mozley, J. B., Essays, Historical and Theological, I., 106-228. 

Littell's Living Age, CXIII, 1586 (Oct. 31, 1874), Article on Laud. 

Bright, W., "Waymarks of History," 323-354, 426-432. 

Also, that invaluable book — bitter, indeed, but no more bitter than 
a prophet's roll has to be sometimes — Dr. Thomas W. Coit's "Puritan- 
ism." 

Maculay's views on Laud are given in his Reviews of Hallam's 
"Constitutional History," and of a "Life of John Hampden." 

To these may well be added now references to Gladstone, W. E., 
Romanes Lecture in Oxford University, Oct. 24, 1892. 

Wakeman, H. O., "The Church and the Puritans," 94-168. 

Hutton, W. H., William Laud, "English Leaders of Religion." 

Hutton, W. H., English Church from Charles I. to Anne, Ch. III.- 
VII. 

Collins, W. E., edited by, Archbishop Laud Commemoration Lec- 
tures. 



William £au6 

^Vrcl)bisl)op of (Tanterbur? , <xnb Mtart?r 



"What is the matter with the present Archbishop of 
Canterbury!" I said to a young Englishman whom I had 
encountered in an English inn in 1888. I had referred, 
I may say, to Archbishop Benson as holding the same 
view that I was advocating of a certain subject, and I 
had been met with a rather contemptuous setting aside 
of my authority. " Oh ! well, ' ' said my ingenuous young 
friend of an hour, "there is nothing the matter with him 
particularly, but when a man talks about 'the martyred 
Laud,' what can you do with him!" Then I took that 
young man to me, and kindly, but firmly, pointed out to 
him in Socratic fashion by catechetical questioning of his 
somewhat inflexible intelligence, that if either Lord Salis- 
bury or Mr. Gladstone should be put to death in a triumph- 
ant uprising of the contrary party, on the ground that his 
political principles, which he had always advocated, were 
injurious to the realm, and because he was such a power- 
ful upholder of them, the statesman so murdered would 
be a martyr, whether his views were right or wrong. 
When he had assented to that commonplace, I felt that 
I had enlarged his historical imagination, and I hoped 
that I had done him good. Surely, whatever we may 
think of Laud otherwise, it is mere beef as against brains 
that refuses him the title of a martyr, dying unselfishly 
for intense convictions, even though no one ever went 
through any useless form of offering him an opportunity 
to recant. And a martyr is apt to be an interesting study, 
even a martyr on the wrong side. "It may be," says 
Canon Mozley, speaking of the interest that clings to this 
very period of history, "it may be that when men die for 



6 William Laud, Akchbishop 

their principles, they are supposed to have something to 
say for themselves." That is what I venture to claim for 
William Laud. He has something to say for himself, and 
for two hundred years English History refused flatly and 
uncritically to hear it. The last fifty years have seen a 
distinct change, but no history of England that I have yet 
seen seems to me to reflect the new light with any fulness. 

Before presenting any positive views about Laud, 
therefore, I want first to set down on the negative side 
that it is unhistorical to call him either a fool or a knave. 
I trust that that will seem to be a moderate statement, 
but nevertheless the thing which I stamp as unhistorical 
has been said over and over. The late Lord Macaulay — 
I emphasize the word "late," for he is a historian more 
thoroughly defunct than Herodotus, — the late Lord Ma- 
caulay is "the infant phenomenon" among English his- 
torians. He did more reading, perhaps, in his boyhood 
and early manhood, than any other man in England, and 
thus he acquired more knowledge, such as it was, and by 
consequence a more superficial and more crudely undi- 
gested knowledge, than any other historical writer of 
eminence that England ever had. Unfortunately, he has 
also been the most popular. In the United States his his- 
tory had a circulation surpassing that of any other book 
in the world except the Bible (Encyclopedia Britannica, 
"Macaulay"). His smart sayings have done much to 
pervert the judgment of our great English-speaking- 
family. "His propositions have no qualifications," says 
the Encyclopedia Britannica.* "Uninstructed readers 
like this assurance, as they like a physician who has no 
doubt about their case. But a sense of distrust grows 
upon the more circumspect reader as he follows page 
after page . . . "We inevitably think of a saying at- 
tributed to Lord Melbourne, 'I wish I were as cocksure of 
any one thing as Macaulay is of everything.' " 

"Cocksure" of everything, carefully exact about noth- 
ing, the man who has stood next to the Bible in the love 
and confidence of our simple-hearted American readers 
is easily contemptuous here. With him William Laud is 



* The article "Macaulay" was written by the late Mark Pattison 
(ob. 1884), who may be described as a "universal solvent" in the field 
of criticism. Though a man in Holy Orders, he had not the prejudices 
of a churchman, nor any prejudice in favor of anything. 



of Canterbury, and Martyr 7 

"an imbecile," "a superstitious driveller," "a ridiculous 
old bigot." Poor soul.! He does not get off with that 
sort of imputation. The same master hand writes him 
down as a vindictive persecutor, "irritable," "quick to 
feel for his own dignity, slow to sympathize with the suf- 
ferings of others, and prone to the error, common in 
superstitious men, of mistaking his own peevish and 
malignant moods for emotions of pious zeal." He has 
"a diabolical temper," which is a pretty strong state- 
ment. Nay, we are told of the Star Chamber and High 
Commission Court, that "Guided chiefly by the violent 
spirit of the primate, and freed from the control of Par- 
liament, they displayed a violence, a rapacity, a malign- 
ant energy, which had been unknown to any former age. 
The government was able, through their instrumentality, 
to fine, imprison, pillory, and mutilate without restraint." 
( Macaulay 's History, p. 68-69). Of course, this last pass- 
age is chiefly talk. Even Mr. Macaulay would have 
acknowledged, if personally pressed, that the royal 
tyranny was harder on Jews in the days of King John 
than on Christian Englishmen in the days of Charles I. 
Even Mr. Macaulay should have felt that the confisca- 
tion of the wealth of the monasteries by Henry VIII. was 
more violent and more rapacious than any proceeding 
that was dreamed of under any of the Stuarts. No doubt, 
he liked that kind of violence and rapacity, however, and 
stood ready to defend it, but how could he compare the 
cutting off of Prynne's and Leighton's ears, as a mat- 
ter of "malignant energy," with the beheading of Sir 
Thomas More, or with the death of Laud himself? 

As to this malignant energy, it is a simple fact, to be 
noted at the beginning of our discussion, that while the 
cause of absolutism has its three martyrs, Charles and 
Strafford and Laud, the party of resistance to oppres- 
sion has none. Not a man lost his life for his opinions, 
political or- religious, during the time when Laud was the 
chief guide of England's statecraft, no, not even in New 
England, where later, under the Commonwealth, they 
began to hang Quakers, and went on until they were 
frightened out of it by the Restoration of King Charles 
II. Compared with courts of the nineteenth century, 
Laudian courts were cruel. The world of his day was 
a cruel world. But compared with Commonwealth courts 



8 William Laud, Akchbishop 

and Puritan courts Laudian courts were distinctly less 
cruel and less oppressive.* 

Another thing I must say right here, "Toleration" 
was not yet a recognized doctrine of the opponents 
against whom Laud felt called to contend. I am 
not saying this to excuse Laud for being intoler- 
ant. Intolerant in principle he was not.f But as an 
adviser of the King, and as a powerful influence in 
English life, he had to deal with people who were them- 
selves intolerant revolutionaries. Pie saw around him in 
England a growing politico-religous party who meant to 
crush out in England, if they could, what he believed to 
be the true religion of Jesus Christ. The rising Puritan 
element of that day had no idea of allowing the Episcopal 
Church to exist anywhere, if they could help it, nor the 
Church of England Prayer Book, nor any ministry claim- 
ing to be a priesthood, nor any such forms of worship 
as the Anglicanism of Laud clung to as most spiritual. 
The Puritan party meant to fight all that sort of thing 
to the death. To tolerate the Puritans with their well- 
known principles was to tolerate (just so far) a con- 
spiracy against English liberty. The Puritan party were 
endeavoring to get power that they might destroy the 
liberty of all men who differed from them in opinion. 
The Westminster Assembly's Longer Catechism includes 
among sins against the Second Commandment "tolerat- 
ing a false religion." The "Solemn League and Coven- 
ant" of the Scottish Puritans pledges them to "extirpate 
popery and prelacy," and forbids the countenancing any 
such evils as unfaithfulness to God. Over here in New 
England, Cotton Mather wrote, "It was toleration that 
made the world anti-Christian, and the Church never 
took hurt by the punishment of heretics." President 
Oakes, of Harvard University, preaching an Election 
Sermon, proclaimed aloud, "I look upon toleration as the 
first-born of all abominations." (T. W. Coit's Puritan- 
ism, p. 285-288). 



* Cf. Stoughton's "Ecclesiastical History of England" (Non-Con- 
formist), II., 362: "The amount of persecution inflicted upon Quakers 
by magistrates and by mobs during the Commonwealth is almost 
incredible." 

fCf. Morley's "Life of Gladstone," III., 480. Mr. Gladstone is 
the speaker: "Do you know whom I find the most tolerant churchman 
of that time? Laud!" 



or Canterbury, and Martyr 9 

Again, I must have a word about the methods of these 
people. Opinion in our time is divided as to what ought 
to be done to people who utter speeches or write pamph- 
lets inciting anarchists to use dynamite. Most of us are 
not yet alarmed with quaking fears that the anarchists 
will do it. If we had such fears, we should demand such 
penalties for such utterances as we thought would stop 
them. In the reign of King Charles I. pamphlets suggest- 
ing that somebody ought to be killed were seriously apt 
to be followed by the killing of somebody. If Leightoo 
lost his ears, and stood in the pillory, it was for writing 
a pamphlet in which he had not only denounced Episco- 
pacy as anti-Christ, and the bishops as men of blood, and 
the Queen as a daughter of Heth, but seriously suggested 
that the bishops should be smitten under the fifth rib. 
(Green's "Short History," p. 512; Gardiner, History of 
England, VII., 145, 6). Buckingham assassinated a few 
years before, the Archbishop of St. Andrews murdered a 
few years later, are significant illustrations from his- 
tory of what such a pamphlet meant. It does seem to me 
that if an ideal man could have been confronted with such 
antagonists, he would have found it necessary to make 
himself odious to them. At any rate, this is certainly 
true. (I take the words from Dr. S. R. Gardiner's Intro- 
duction to his "Constitutional Documents of the Puritan 
Revolution," p. xxv. ; in 2nd Edition, p. xxvi). "Laud 

was fully penetrated by the conviction that 

he and his friends must either crush the Calvinists or be 
crushed by them." He was quite right. When the Cal- 
vinists did get into power, they trampled the Church of 
England into the dust, and silenced her reverend voice 
for all the seventeen years that their power lasted. And 
withal, while Laud was the power behind the throne, not 
one of these chief and dreaded opponents was sent to 
death. That fate was reserved for. Laud himself. 

But the impression is fastened upon the mind of an 
unstudions public, loving rhetoric more than history, and 
Puritans better than facts, that Archbishop Laud was a 
bitter, unprincipled persecutor, dealing out fines, im- 
prisonment, mutilations, and the horrors of the pillory 
to any and all Englishmen that happened to be opposed 
to his views. Do I exaggerate? Lord Macaulay has 
made it difficult for me to do so. "We are informed," 



10 William Laud, Archbishop 

he says, "by Clarendon, that there was hardly a man of 
note in the realm who had not personal experience of the 
harshness and the greediness of the Star-Chamber," and 
we have been told before that that Court was "guided 
chiefly by the violent temper of the primate." Well, 
Lord Clarendon is a great authority. I shall tell you in 
a moment what he really said. But he did not speak of 
"harshness" and "greediness," and how interesting it 
would have been if Lord Macaulay had added in a foot- 
note the same Lord Clarendon's language about the 
"splendor of [the primate's] piety." I trust that this 
long prelude may be of some use in clearing the ground. 
However that may be, I will now bring before you some 
notes on Laud as a Churchman, Laud as a Statesman, 
and Laud as a Man. 

I. And first of Laud as a Man. 

Whatever else his true picture may contain, and I 
dare not undertake to set before you any full or fair por- 
traiture of his character, it must certainly include these 
six elements, a frail, almost sickly body, with an insigni- 
ficant appearance, a keen and eager intellect, a tender, 
thoughtful heart, a hot and sometimes harsh temper, a 
tremendous and by consequence imperious will, and a 
constant habit of deep devotion. I want to dwell some- 
what on each of these in turn. 

(a) First, then, my hero had not a heroic body. He was 
a little, insignificant-looking, reel-faced man, with little 
peering eyes (he was near-sighted, I imagine), in fact, a 
man whose appearance it was easy to caricature and easy 
to ridicule. The Puritan pamphleteers did it unmerci- 
fully. Nay, besides ridiculing his stature and his face and 
calling him by such titles as "arch-wolf," "arch-devil," 
and "the devil's most triumphant arch to adorn his vic- 
tories," these pious adversaries wrote about his birth 
(which was of quiet honest people of small means) in 
language which would now be considered not only mean, 
but vile. Eeturning now to the good man's body, he 
never had strong health. "Laud carried with him from 
his birth," says Canon Mozley, "one of those constitu- 
tions which are always ailing and never failing. He had 
never good health for long together; and his fierce attacks 
of illness brought him sometimes to death's door, leav- 
ing him, however, as strong for work again as ever, as 



of Canterbury, and Martyr 11 

soon as they were passed. A creaking gate lasts; weak- 
ness and iron often go together in the bodily constitution. 
There are different kinds of health: rude and full; 
slender and wiry; indoors health, and outdoors health; 
reading health, and hunting health; the healths capacitat- 
ing respectively for mental and for bodily work. Laud 
had the weakly kind of health eminently; a vigorous, 
obstinate, indoors constitution. His ailings, except when 
they broke out violently, seem only to have operated as 
a sort of unconscious stimulus and mental mustard- 
plaster, perpetually keeping him up to his work, — his 
internal Puritans." 

Some touches in his letters have given me a suspicion 
that he was always tired, as well he might be, with his 
frail body and his tremendous work. It would hardly 
be an exaggeration to say that this little man, "in bodily 
presence weak," like a certain New Testament Arch- 
bishop, and having, like him, "the care of all the 
Churches," had actually set himself to know what was 
going on everywhere in England, and to see that it went 
on right. When a weak body is held up to that kind of 
service by an unflinching spirit, though the spirit feels 
all that body's pains and faintings, and that for more 
than seventy years of life, it may be, as I said, that the 
body is not heroic, but the man is. 

(b) Now I am forced to say something about the in- 
tellect of this man. Macaulay calls him "an imbecile," 
as well as "a ridiculous old bigot," mainly, I suppose, 
because he took opposite views of certain situations to 
those which Macaulay himself took two hundred years 
later. Now a great scholar may be a "bigot" and "ridi- 
culous," but hardly an "imbecile," and my first point 
is that Laud had scholarship, and indeed became one of 
the first scholars of his day. "He had a happy educa- 
tion in his childhood," we are told by his first biographer, 
"under a very severe schoolmaster." (Heylin, quoted by 
Mozley, p. 111). That severe master begged his pupil to 
remember him when he should become a great man, and 
the boy seems to have impressed his schoolmaster in the 
same way. At sixteen years of age he entered St. John's 
College, Oxford. At twenty-one he had been graduated 
with honors and had won a fellowship. At twenty-eight 
he was ordained by Bishop Young of Rochester, who on 



12 William Laud, Archbishop 

examining him "found," we are told, "his study raised 
above the system and opinions of the age, on the noble 
foundation of the Fathers, Councils, and the Ecclesi- 
astical Historians, and presaged, that, if he lived, he 
would be an instrument of restoring the Church from the 
narrow and private principles of modern times." 

Now that was the impression of scholarship and brains 
and power made by a young man, of a middle-class 
family of small means, who had thus far no acquaintance 
at court, no social power, and no "pull" in English poli- 
tics. He had nothing but what he was in himself and 
what he had done at Oxford, to give any cause for imag- 
ining that he would ever fill any great positions and 
wield any high authority. I am just going to mention 
here as illustrating the nature of his mind that besides 
munificent gifts to St. John's College, — a whole new build- 
ing, etc. — in after times he founded the Laudian Pro- 
fessorship of Arabic in the University, and introduced 
there the study of Oriental languages, the foundation of 
all scholarly progress in the study of the Old Testament. 
Few men in the England of his day had breadth of 
scholarship enough, or height of scholarship either, to 
have done that. But mainly I am going to ask you to 
take it on my say-so, that Laud's controversial writings 
against Romanism and other works of his show a large 
and masterly scholarship. I must, however, bring out a 
little what the Oxford career meant. 

We think of Oxford as High-Church and Royalist 
to the core of its sentimental heart. Behold! The Ox- 
ford of Laud's youth was Puritan and Calvinistic from 
center to circumference. There were but two fellows of 
colleges in the whole University, where "fellows" were 
numbered by scores, that were known to be what Laud's 
loving friend and protege and biographer, Heylin, is will- 
ing to call "Orthodox." The English Reformers had 
appealed to the Primitive Church for a model. In other 
words, Cranmer and Parker had succeeded in guiding 
the English Reformation (in its professed theory) in the 
lines of the so-called Oxford Movement of this century. 
But partly from want of scholarly knowledge of the 
Primitive Church, and much, very much, more from want 
of sympathy with it, the main line of the clergy and 
people of England had swung over into an extreme of 



of Canterbury, and Martyr 13 

Calvinism and Puritanism. Both the great universities 
were absolutely dominated by that kind of religious idea. 
Laud came to Oxford, a disciple of the tiny High-Church 
School that had barely a name to live, and he had to tight 
every inch of his way. Every honor that he gained was 
wrung from unwilling authorities. His academic theses 
maddened the very judges who were to pronounce upon 
his success. But he did succeed. He not only extorted 
honors, he disseminated ideas. He made a High-Church 
party in Oxford, and in fifty years from his graduation 
the party that Laud had created was so strong that it 
dominated Oxford in turn, when Laud himself was a for- 
lorn prisoner in the Tower, awaiting execution. The 
turning-point came perhaps in 1611, when he stood for the 
Presidency of St. John's College, and got it, being then 
thirty-eight years old, and as yet unknown at court, save 
that he had once preached before King James, two years 
earlier. The Puritan Vice-Chancellor, and all the Puri- 
tan party, moved heaven and earth against him. He him- 
self was sick in London and could not so much as write 
notes to friends. Nevertheless, the election went in his 
favor, and one of the opposition, in bitter wrath, seized 
the paper containing the votes and tore it in pieces be- 
fore the announcement could be made. Then followed 
(strangely enough) an appeal to the Crown, which only 
introduced Dr. Laud more fully at court, and was de- 
cided (not very strangely) in his favor. In his diary he 
notes the day of the decision with interest. It was 
August 29, marked in the English Calendar by the com- 
memoration of the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, 
the "Saint John" for whom the College was named. 
There came to be another coincidence about this associa- 
tion with beheading by and by. I will only add now that 
the friendless boy who came up to Oxford, as it then was, 
at sixteen, and did this much in twenty-two years, was no 
imbecile, but a man of brains and force of character. 

Perhaps, while I am talking about his intellect I might 
mention two especially common charges, — superstition, 
and a narrow incapacity for understanding the force and 
fury of the popular movement. I will take the second first. 
He is supposed to have lived in himself so much, like a 
scholarly recluse, that he could not take in the idea of 
how other people thought and felt, especially if they 



14 William Laud, Archbishop 

thought and felt just as he was eager that they should 
not. Let me suggest, on the other hand, that as censor 
of the press Laud during his Archbishopric had the 
largest possible opportunity of knowing the symptoms 
of discontent. He was constantly receiving reports also 
from every part of the realm, and he was not a scholarly 
recluse, but the most active man of affairs, probably, in 
the three Kingdoms. Nor are we without indications 
that he regarded the royal policy as ruinous. In his cor- 
respondence with Strafford, we find both complaining of 
a mixture of policies, their own, strong and active, and 
another, slow and temporizing and feeble. "Thorough" 
was the watchword that these two friends were always 
interchanging, but hear how Laud speaks of it in a letter 
written in 1637, three years before the first movement 
toward his fall from power, — "What think you of Thor- 
ough when there can be such slips in business of con- 
sequence 1 ?" He is speaking of the blunder of putting 
Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick in the pillory, and then 
allowing them to harangue a crowd of applauding friends 
with seditious and treasonable utterances during the 
whole time of their supposed punishment, which was a 
foolish way to punish sedition, and not Laud's way at 
all. "It is true," Laud presently goes on, "that some 
men speak as your Lordship writes, but when anything 
comes to be acted against them there is little or nothing 
done, nor shall I ever live to see it otherwise." Strafford 
returned a playful answer, but Laud was serious and 
would not joke, this time, though they joked together 
much, and in fact, so much as to show that Laud had that 
invaluable sense of humor which is one of the best anti- 
dotes to narrowness. "I have given up," he says with 
a melancholy solemnity, — "I have given up expecting of 
Thorough." So too those dreams about which we are 
presently to say somewhat, are the dreams of a melan- 
choly and anxious man. Here is one which came about 
four years before his death. I will give it just as it stands 
in the Archbishop's diary. 

"Jan. 24. Friday, At night I dreamed, that my 
Father (who died 46 years since) came to me; and to my 
thinking, he was as well and as cheerful, as ever I saw 
him. He asked me what I did here? And after some 
Speech, I asked him how long he would stay with me? 



of Canterbury, and Martyr 15 

He answered; he would stay, till he had me away with 
him. I am not moved with Dreams; yet I thought fit 
to remember this." 

The fact is that people assume that Laud foresaw no 
evil because he did not turn aside for any. My own 
reading of him is that he lived for years in fear and 
heaviness of spirit, but did not feel at liberty at any time 
to change his course, in order to save his power, his pos- 
sessions, his freedom, or even his life. 

But having given one of his dreams, I must deal with 
that other charge. His mind had the smallness of super- 
stition. Well, yes! He does record dream after dream 
in his diary, between twenty-five and thirty of them in 
twenty years. Here is one of them : 

"A. D. 1626. March 8. Thursday, I came to Lon- 
don. The night following, I dreamed, that I was rec- 
onciled to the Church of Rome. This troubled me much; 
and I wondered exceedingly how it should happen. Nor 
was I aggrieved with myself [only by Reason of the 
Errors of that Church, but also] upon account of the 
Scandal, which from my fall would be cast upon many 
Eminent and Learned Men in the Church of England.* 
So being troubled in my dream, I said to myself, that I 
would go immediately, and, confessing my fault, would 
beg pardon of the Church of England. Going with this 
resolution, a certain Priest met me, and would have 
stopped me. But moved with indignation, I went on my 
way. And while I wearied myself with these trouble- 
some thoughts I awoke. Herein I felt such strong im- 
pressions; that I could scarce believe it to be a Dream." 

You will observe that there is no indication of attach- 
ing any importance to this. You have heard him say of 
his dream of his father, "I am not moved with dreams; 
yet I thought fit to remember this." I will give one 
more, and then I will moralize a little. In 1635, in the 
Diary for Oct. 18, we find this: 

"I dreamed that I was going out in haste, and that 
when I came into my outer Chamber, there was my Serv- 
ant Will: Pennell in the same riding- suit which he had 
on that day sevennight at Hampton Court with me. Me- 

* Prynne, presenting extracts from the Diary at the Archbishop's 
trial, actually quoted this dream, omitting the words which I have 
placed in brackets! 



16 William Laud, Archbishop 

thought I wondered to see him (for I left him sick at 
home) and asked him, how he did, and what he made 
there. And that he answered, he came to receive my 
Blessing; and with that fell on his knees. That hereupon 
I laid my Hand upon his Head, and Prayed over him, 
and therewith awaked. When I was up, 1 told this to 
them of my Chamber ; and added, that I should find Pen- 
nell dead or dying. My coach came; and when I came 
home, I found him past Sense, and giving up the Ghost. 
So my Prayers (as they had frequently before) com- 
mended him to God. ' ' 

The next year, I must add, he has another dream, 
which comes true next day, and he sets it all down, but 
adds " Somniis tamen liaud multum ficlo," ''Nevertheless, 
I don't put much trust in dreams." 

It remains that he did write down many dreams, and 
also such curious happenings as that two robin-red- 
breasts flew into his study, to which he attaches no hint 
of a meaning, and again, when his troubles were very 
dark around him, that he went into his Library and found 
his own picture fallen from the wall and lying face down- 
wards on the floor, and it made him sad. AVas he then a 
drivelling fool? 

I venture to say that he was not, but that in an age 
when the government of the world by law was hardly 
dreamed of in comparison with what we know to-day, and 
when the most scientific minds still regarded God's 
providences as what we should now call particular and 
arbitrary, this man, filled with an intense and clinging 
faith in a heavenly Father, regarded every happening of 
every day as in some sort a special message of that 
Father. Please observe that he was separated from the 
victims of a vulgar superstition in two points. He did 
not pretend to be able to interpret these messages and 
map out the future by them (with one exception when his 
profound impression proved to be a true one), and again, 
and more especially, when he began to think that God 
was trying to make him think of impending misfortune 
and death, he did not meanly try to run away from such 
things, but only set his house in order so as to be ready 
to meet them with a prepared soul, if they should come. 
I fully believe that a Christian man ought sometimes to 



of Canterbury, axd Martyr 17 

read the conditions of life as signs in just that way, even 
in this twentieth century, saying, not "I am sure that 
such a thing is going to happen," but "I wonder if God 
wants me to think about such and such a thing, that my 
circumstances keep suggesting it so curiously. And if 
He does want me to think about it as a possibility ; what 
in particular would He have me think?" Such was, I 
believe, the working of the mind of Laud. Certainly he 
was in his religion preeminently a filial, rather than a 
meanly fearful, soul. 

Before I leave Laud's intellect, I must add one thing 
more. The number of Littell's "Living Age" for Oct. 
31, 1874, reprints from "Fraser's Magazine" a notable 
article on Archbishop Laud by a Scottish Presbyterian 
writer. It is of the utmost value as coming from a fair- 
minded foe, who is sharply opposed to Laud, but cannot 
swallow Macaulay. I must quote a part of one of his 
telling paragraphs. 

"If," he says, "we were required without going into 
the details of his history to give some means of measur- 
ing the abilities of Laud, to account for the part he played 
in affairs, and to understand why the Puritans doomed 
him to death, we should name his correspondence with 
Strafford. Lord Macaulay exhausts his powers of 
language in extolling the genius and energy of Strafford, 
but he does not explain the surprising circumstance that 
the Jove-like Wentworth should have found his friend of 
friends in a 'ridiculous old bigot.' It is impossible to 
read Strafford's letters to Laud without perceiving that; 
the statesman profoundly respects and implicitly trusts 
the divine. 'Your grace,' writes Strafford from Ireland, 
'whom, I protest, upon my faith, I reverence more than 
any -other subject in the whole world, and to whose judg- 
ment I shall sooner lean and trust myself than my own.' " 
Then, after some more extracts, my writer goes on to this 
comment on Laud's side of the correspondence. "As we 
mark the combination of firmness with tenderness, of 
frankness with delicacy [note those words from an op- 
ponent, "tenderness," "delicacy"], of judgment, sound 
and shrewd, with sympathy and intelligence in his an- 
swer, we are forced to believe that Strafford was not 
fundamentally wrong in his conception of the man." 



18 William Laud, Archbishop 

(c, d, e) I have given extraordinary space to the con- 
sideration of Laud's intellect. I think that it was not 
unreasonable. A man's intellectual character is a very 
large part of his whole character, especially if he have 
one of the strongest and best-trained minds, of his day, 
and the Macaulay picture did need so much retouching. 
I will now proceed a little more rapidly, combining in 
one view the next three features that I promised to dis- 
cuss, — the tender, sympathetic heart, the harsh temper, 
and the imperious will, with its somewhat overbearing 
and tyrannous habit. 

Everybody agrees that Laud had a peculiarly sensi- 
tive spirit. There is no need to argue that point. It 
comes out over and over. The entry in his diary, not 
long before his downfall, in which he mentions not going 
out till the evening to avoid the gazing of the crowd, his 
dreams in which he sees courtiers railing and jeering at 
him, his anxious jottings about coldness by this one and 
that one, the language used in his private devotions about 
difficulties and enemies and slanderers and trouble of 
many kinds, illustrate this point beyond peradventure. 
They help also to show that this great man did not live 
in a fool's paradise for most of his life, as some seem to 
think. But a very sensitive man may be a very selfish 
man, — he is singularly apt to be, — and that is Lord Ma- 
caulay 's view of Laud. He writes him "peevish," "ma- 
lignant," "quick to feel for his own dignity, slow to 
sympathize with the sufferings of others." We remark 
that a man of deeply-ingrained selfishness cannot live and 
die for a cause with the intense and persistent self-sacri- 
fice that Laud bestowed upon the English Church and 
nation. Yet it may be retorted, not unreasonably, that a 
man may be vastly unselfish in that high sense, and yet 
vastly unsympathetic toward human suffering and sor- 
row in the individual cases around him. Laud lived for 
a cause, not for himself. No doubt of that. He was mag- 
nificently generous to Oxford University, and to St. John's 
College in particular, when it would serve the great 
cause that he had at heart. No doubt about that, either. 
But I look for something more to show real human sym- 
pathy with human hearts, and I think I find it. The Diary 
shows him tender of his poor about Lambeth. They 
gathered in hundreds to take farewell of him when he 



of Canterbury, and Martyr 19 

went to his trial.* He was tender of his native town of 
Beading, and especially for the poor of the town. His 
first act, when he became a parish priest, was to set apart 
out of his living a provision for the care of twelve poor 
men. As a minister of State, he reformed the English 
system of taxation, so that it should fall less heavily upon 
the poor and more upon the rich, and of course this was a 
source of fearful unpopularity and abuse.f So, too, he 
befriended an old apple-woman who had been forbidden 
by the Lord Mayor of London to ply her trade in St. 
Paul's Churchyard, over which, as it happened, his Wor- 
ship had no jurisdiction. Laud thought the matter not 
too small to bring his Worship before the Privy Council 
for, and warned him to mind his own business for the 
future. No sympathy here for pompous Lord Mayors 
breaking the law, but perhaps some for the apple-woman. 
Again, he was tender of his servants. We have seen how 
he dreamed of the sick man of his household coming and 
asking for his blessing. In a like spirit we read in the 
Diary his note on the death of his steward: "Mr. Adam 
Forbes, my Ancient, Loving, and Trusty Servant, then 
my Steward, after he had served me full 42 years, dyed, 
to my great loss and grief." 

Again, he could be sympathetic with virulent op- 
ponents. We saw how a Fellow of St. John's College 
tore up the scrutiny-paper, to try to prevent Laud's 
election. What do you suppose a "narrow," "peevish," 
and "malignant" man, and above all, an "imbecile old 
bigot," would have done about it? What Laud did was 
to hold a court to try the offence, as was proper, and 
after it had been properly condemned by authority, then 
to come down and embrace the offender, and propose to 
forgive and forget. He not only thoroughly reconciled 
the man, but eventually got him Church promotion, mar- 
ried him to his (Laud's) niece, and at last made him his 
successor in that very office of President of St. John's 
College. 

Again, I shall instance Laud's two great court friend- 
ships, with Buckingham and Strafford. No one with a 

* "As I went to my barge," says the Diary, "hundreds of my poor 
neighbors stood there, and prayed for my safety and return to my 
house. For which I bless God and them." 

f Laud was a sort of a Seventeenth Century Lloyd-George. But, 
alas! he came down too soon! 



20 William Laud, Archbishop 

reasonable eye for indications can fail to see that these 
were not mere political alliances, but tender personal at- 
tachments, both of them. "Quick to feel for his own 
dignity," was he! Certainly he was, and he had some to 
feel for. That sensitive old man went to the block with a 
splendid dignity as well as a child-like faith. "Slow to 
feel for the sufferings of others," we are told. Ah! but 
when he saw another man suffer, his dignity broke down. 
When he lifted up his hands to perform the last office of 
priest and friend for his beloved Strafford, asking his 
blessing as he passed beneath the window of his prison, 
on his way to execution, the aged Archbishop — and old 
age, you know, is apt to shrink into itself and care less 
than of yore for others' joys or griefs — that old man, 
who was going himself so cheerfully to such a trial a 
little later, • fainted dead away from overmastering 
anguish at the thought of the cruel wrong done this, his 
friend. 

Of the unshakableness of this sensitive spirit I am not 
going to say much. Everybody knows that he had it. In 
the very striking words of the Scottish writer whom I 
have quoted before, "He made his soul like unto a 
wedge!" Only I ask you to think how much that means 
for a man who felt unpopularity with a peculiar depth of 
misery, and who knew that in living for others as he felt 
bound to live, he was simply courting unpopularity. 
Hear him answering Strafford's wish that in his office of 
Archbishop of Canterbury he might have "many and 
happy days." "But truly, my lord," says the new 
primate, "I look for neither: not for many, for I am in 
years, and I have had a troublesome life ; not for happy, 
for I have no hope to do the good I desire." That is the 
martyr's spirit, of a truth, giving up life and happiness 
for an object, while inwardly assured that one cannot in 
this world's way of measuring, accomplish the object 
after all. 

But while a tremendous will is a splendid gift of God 
to any man, and the cultivation of such under a Chris- 
tian conscience in a great virtue, yet such a gift is apt 
to betray its possessor into some unworthy using thereof. 
We must look at the charges of harsh temper and over- 
bearing and tyrannous disregard of individual liberty. 
Partly I have confessed them. The Archbishop used to 



of Canterbury, axd Martyr 21 

confess theni himself. He was too deep a Christian not 
to have made a study of his own faults. He knew himself 
irritable and hasty, and tried to learn more of self-gov- 
ernment. "Lord, give me patience," is a common entry, 
as I recall my impressions of the Diary. But, partly, I 
think that the common picture is much overdrawn. Laud 
was vilely slandered and infamously abused during all 
his career as a statesman. If he was ugly toward his 
enemies, it would inevitably appear in the intimacies of 
his Diary. Behold ! the worst things he has to say about 
them are such as I can give you in the two following ex- 
tracts, one preceding, and one following, his promotion 
to the Archbishopric: "(1632) Feb. 28, Thursday, Mr. 
Chancellour of London, Dr. Duck (Laud was then Bishop 
of London), brought me word, how miserably 1 was 
slandered by some Separatists. I pray God give me 
patience and forgive them." 

"(1633) Nov. 13, Wednesday about the 

beginning of this month the Lady Davis Prophesied 
against me, that I should very few Days out-live the Fifth 
of November. And a little after that, one Green came 
into the Court at St. James's with a great sword by his 
Side, swearing the King should do him Justice against 
me. All the wrong I ever did this Man, was, that being 
a poor Printer, I procured him of the Company of the 
Stationers 5 pounds a Year during his Life. God pre- 
serve me and forgive him. He was committed to New- 
gate." 

"Committed to Newgate," you will observe, simply 
to prevent him from carrying out an avowed purpose of 
assassination. Undoubtedly, in an age of personal gov- 
ernment, when about every really great man that one 
reads of was high-handed and overbearing, according to 
the notions of to-day, this great man was so too. Oliver 
Cromwell was quite as much so in later days. John Knox 
and John Calvin had been quite as much so in a time gone 
by, each according to the utmost of his opportunity. It 
is interesting right here to ask how Laud comes to be 
painted blacker in these respects than other men, with 
whom he is simply in close parallel. Well, first, it is be- 
cause Laud was identified with the Stuarts, and the 
Stuart cause has been a hopelessly lost cause in England, 
with the exception of a little space of less than thirty 



22 William Laud, Archbishop 

years, ever since Laud was put to death. That has segre- 
gated him from English sympathies. Few people have 
even wished to do him justice. 

But another and truly glorious cause of his ill name 
is this, — he was a universal radical reformer. It should 
be remembered, but is always forgotten, that the punish- 
ments inflicted by courts and councils in which Laud 
figured were all inflicted upon law-breakers. They 
seem to be supposed in these days to be specimens of 
mere malicious mischief dealt out to all persons whom 
the Archbishop did not like. Far from it! They were 
all penalties of broken law or injured right. But certain 
laws and certain rights were very unpopular in the Eng- 
land of those days. Take, first, the matter of Church 
property, in which Laud interested himself very keenly. 
In Tudor days Henry VIII. had set the example of spolia- 
tion by plundering the monasteries and allowing a large 
part of the spoil to go to the landed proprietors, who in- 
deed in many cases simply helped themselves to the ma- 
terial of abandoned monastic buildings without the form 
of a grant. Under Edward VI. the Churches nearly all 
over the land were despoiled of all property which the 
rising Protestantism of the time could conveniently label 
as "superstitious," and that was much. This process, 
sternly checked for a while under Mary, was renewed 
under Elizabeth. What was the consequence by the time 
the Stuarts came to the throne? Why, the landed gentry 
had come to feel that the Churches and largely the Church 
property of rural England were in their hands to do with 
about as they liked. The "squires" were the natural 
trustees and protectors of the Church's property in the 
rural district. It had come to pass that they had largely 
lost the sense of their proper responsibilties as guardians 
of sacred things, and had become plunderers with the air 
of proprietors. If a rich man wanted a larger house and 
saw the Parish Church only half filled, he was ready to 
pull down a transept and build his new wing with the 
stone. If he found the Parish Church unreasonably rich 
in massive old silverware and elegant vestments, he 
would take the silver for his sideboard, and the velvet, 
or satin, or cloth of gold for his lady's gown. The 
Church had been the guardian of morals for the nation, 
also, in older times, and the Post-Reformation Church 



of Canterbury, and Martyr 23 

was undoubtedly a church not feared as it had been, but 
much weakened and despised; and a lamentable decay 
of morals had followed. There was a reign of lawless- 
ness all through the land, and Laud was determined to 
bring in a reign of law instead. King James, with a keen 
Scottish shrewdness, detected in him a "restless" spirit, 
and refused to promote him. Laud was just the sort of 
man who in a "prohibition State," like Maine, would try 
to force the prohibitory law in summer hotels and among 
gentlemen, as well as in back streets and piggeries. I 
have already mentioned Macaulay's statement quoted 
from Clarendon, "that there was hardly a man of note 
in the realm who had not had personal experience of the 
harshness and greediness of the Star Chamber." One is 
left to suppose that these persons of note were guilty of 
no other offense than having a Puritan conscience. I take 
pleasure, therefore, in quoting Clarendon's own words: 

"Persons of honor and great quality of the court and 
of the country were every day cited into the High Com- 
mission court" — that is Clarendon's real testimony — 
"upon the fame of their incontinence, or other scandal in 
their lives, and were there prosecuted to their shame and 
punishment." 

Naturally, such persons didn't like Laud. Sad to say, 
they appealed successfully to Puritan prejudice against 
him. The first beginning of Laud's downfall after his 
arrest (December 18, 1640) is (December 20) his being 
fined 500 pounds for wrongful imprisonment of a noble- 
man. The nobleman had been notoriously guilty of long- 
continued adulterous union with a lady of rank.* 

Returning for a moment to Church property matters, 
let me give you one example of "Laud's tyranny." A 
Mr. Freshfield, Recorder of Salisbury, was fined 500 
pounds — which may be even $10,000 in present-day value, 
I suppose — for so small an offence as running his cane 
through a stained-glass window in a Church, containing 

*I find in S. R. Gardiner's "History of England" (VIII., 121-2) a 
remarkable testimony in this connection. "It is possible that Laud 
might have carried his point of reducing the clergy to discipline, 
if he had left the laity alone. It is possible that he might have suc- 
ceeded in meting out equal law to the rich and poor., if he had left 
the Puritan clergy to worship according to their conscience. As it 
was, he irritated all classes in turn." [Italics are mine, not Dr. 
Gardiner's.] According to this view, Laud died for meting out equal 
law to rich and poor. Let that be remembered of him! 



24 William Laud, Archbishop 

a representation (of God the Father symbolized as an 
old man) which offended his conscience. "Enormously 
disproportionate fine," says even one of my own party, 
an English Churchman, the late Canon Perry, of Lincoln 
Cathedral. I ask you to stop and think. Suppose the 
existence of Raphael's Sistine Madonna was seriously 
threatened by a fanatical Protestant sect in Saxony. 
Would it be reasonable and just to deal with such a 
danger by mild measures ? If rich men were in it, should 
they not be well assured that no moderate fines would be 
their portion, if they were caught mutilating one of the 
world's chief treasures? Well, look at the Salisbury case 
again. The art of the medieval glass workers is hope- 
lessly lost. A little of it, nay, a good deal of it, still re- 
mains in England in this reign of Charles I., and Puritan 
fanaticism threatens it all with irreparable destruction. 
Is it vindictive, malignant, bigoted, to make an awful ex- 
ample of a man of education, wealth, and position, an 
officer of the law and of the Crown, who is found to have 
destroyed in wilful hatred a piece of public property that 
can never be restored, at a time when a large part of un- 
educated, lawless, and irresponsible England is hesitat- 
ing over the question whether to make an onslaught on 
all such property, or not Laud did not succeed. There 
are hardly more than a few fragments of medieval glass 
left in England to-day. But my sympathies are with 
him. The glass ought to have been saved.* 

I suspect that there was one more cause of Laud's 
reputation for harshness and tyranny. He was of a 
middle-class family. It is inconceivable that he had not 
been subjected to the galling combination of condescen- 
sion, insult, and neglect, with which the unconscientious 
great people in any, even a republican, form of society, 
always treat the people that are smaller. I think that he 
suffered from the meanness of the upper-class people in 
his youth, and learned to know their characteristic faults 
thoroughly and detest them profoundly. I do not think 

*But after all I find in Gardiner (History of England, VII, 148) 
this statement: "In truth, the enormous fines which have left such a 
mark on the history of this reign [of Charles I.] were seldom exacted, 
and became little more than a conventional mode in which the judges 
expressed their horror at the offense, except so far as they may have 
been intended to bring the offender to an early confession of his 
fault." 



of Canterbury, and Martyr 25 

it was revenge. I am sure he was too good a Christian 
for that. But certainly when he had come to be a great 
man himself, he loved to take down a certain sort of great 
people, and he did it with immense power. He sent for 
the Lord Chief Justice of England, himself an elderly 
man, and a man of strong nature, to come before the 
Privy Council, and there scolded him for a certain dis- 
regard of the royal authority. It was no weakling, who 
even in that coign of vantage could send the Lord Chief 
Justice away in tears. But it was almost always that 
sort of people, the great people of England, that Laud 
treated in that way. You will remember the Lord Mayor 
and the apple-woman. On the other hand, the author of 
a bitter contemporary pamphlet, The True Character of 
an Untrue Bishop, says of him, ''He observeth the 
Scripture in the spirit of it, useth his greatest ad- 
versaries with most meekness, I mean, of the separation 
of the noncomformists." * He did set down great men 
very hard, when they came before him as offenders. He 
was gentle to the small. That is a noble kind of bad 
temper, certainly, if one must have a bad temper at all. 

(/) I said that to make up any fair presentation of 
the man, one must include a deep and constant piety. I 
should be glad to dwell much on that part of our Arch- 
bishop's character, and it would be simple justice. Ma- 
caulay, indeed, found somewhere a statement that in the 
correspondence of Laud and Stratford no sense of duty to 
God or man ever appears as a motive, and he defends 
that statement. Friends of justice point out that here 
or there in that correspondence occurs mention of good 
works such as ordinary Christians do from such motives. 
The ready answer is that in the case of Laud and Straf- 
ford no such motive is to be credited to them unless it is 



* This is quoted by clear old Thomas Fuller in his "Church History 
of Britain" (VI., 299). The Puritan writer winds off his sentence 
thus: "Concluding that diversity of opinion will beget their ruin and 
establish him in his station." Truly a prophetic word. 

Let me note here a contrast. Laud sends the Lord Chief Justice 
away vowing through tears that he has been "choked with a pair of 
lawn sleeves." Laud has his arch-enemy Prynne before him, and when 
the Court condemns the man to imprisonment without books, and 
without pens, ink, and paper, protests that such a punishment would 
be barbarous, and secures the remission of that part of the sentence. 
To tell how Prynne treated Laud in prison in the Tower would make 
another interesting picture, but I have not space for it. 



26 William Laud, Archbishop 

expressly mentioned. To such a critic nothing can be 
proved but that which he desires to see. If, on the other 
hand, a lover of Laud says that his Diary shows him to 
have been one who walked with God in a peculiar, filial 
intimacy, all through his career, that again must be some- 
what unconvincing, unless the Diary can be laid before 
the inquirer's eye in all its long self -revelation. I ven- 
ture, therefore, to rest my whole case as to the character 
of the martyr's piety on the story of the martyrdom 
itself. A man cannot walk with God serenely, in a tender, 
familiar intimacy, on the scaffold where the headsman is 
waiting for him with ax and block, unless the man has 
had much practice in walking with God, and learned the 
lessons of a deep experience, in some easier time gone 
by. 

The day of the Archbishop's death was January 10. 
Always an observer of coincidences, he could not but note 
with a certain pleasure that it was the day of com- 
memoration of Saint William, Archbishop of Bourges, in 
the Calendar of the French Church. S. William had had 
his Puritans, too, the Albigenses of the twelfth century, 
and had distinguished himself by refusing to join in per- 
secuting them to the death after the evil fashion of his 
day. Our Archbishop had slept soundly till his servants 
came to wake him, — "a most assured sign," says his 
biographer, "of a soul prepared." 

"In the morning he was early at his prayers," says 
Heylin, "at which he continued till Pennington, Lieuten- 
ant of the Tower, and other public officers, came to con- 
duct him to the scaffold, which he ascended with so brave 
a courage, such a cheerful countenance, as if he had 
mounted rather to behold a triumph than be made a sacri- 
fice; and came not then to die, but be translated. And 
though some rude and uncivil people reviled him, as lie 
passed along, with opprobrious language, as loath to let 
him go to the grave in peace, yet it never discomposed 
his thoughts nor disturbed his patience. For he had 
profited so well in the school of Christ, that, 'when he was 
reviled, he reviled not again ; when he suffered, he 
threatened not, but committed his cause to Him that 
judgeth righteously. ' ' ' 

What the Archbishop had to say to the people was 
carefullv written down. Indeed, it is recorded that after 



of Canterbury, and Martyr 27 

reading it, he turned to a reporter, and begged him par- 
ticularly not to put forth an inaccurate account. He 
might not have read the paper exactly, but by the care- 
fully written word he wished to be judged. "I beseech 
you, let me have no wrong done me." "Sir, you shall 
not," said the reporter. "If I do so, let it fall upon my 
own head. I pray God, have mercy upon your soul." "I 
thank you," the martyr said. "I did not speak with any 
jealousy, as if you would do so, but only, as a poor man 
going out of the world, it is not possible for me to keep 
to the words of my paper, and a phrase might do me 
wrong." Here, then, are some extracts from that paper 
by which Laud asks so anxiously to be judged. 

The Archbishop's Speech upon the Scaffold. 

"Good People, — This is an uncomfortable time to 
preach; yet I shall begin with a text of Scripture, 
Hebrews xii. 2: 'Let us run with patience the race that 
is set before us: looking unto Jesus, the Author and 
Finisher of our faith, Who, for the joy that was set before 
Him, endured the Cross, despising the shame, and is set 
down at the right hand of the throne of God.' 

' ' I have been long in my race ; and how I have looked 
to Jesus, the Author and Finisher of my faith, He best 
knows. I am now come to the end of my race ; and here 
I find the Cross, a death of shame. But the shame must 
be despised, or no coming to the right hand of God. 
Jesus despised the shame for me, and God forbid but that 
I should despise the shame for Him. 

"I am going apace, as you see, towards the Red Sea, 
and my feet are now upon the very brink of it; an argu- 
ment, I hope, that God is bringing me into the Land of 
Promise ; for that was the way through which He led His 
people. 

"But before they came to it, He instituted a passover 
for them. A lamb it was, but it must be eaten with sour 
herbs. I shall obey, and labor to digest the sour herbs 
as well as the lamb. And I shall remember it is the 
Lord's passover. I shall not think of the herbs, nor be 
angry with the hand that gathereth them; but look up 
only to Him who instituted that, and governs these; for 
men can have no more power over me than what is given 
them from above. 



28 "William Laud, Archbishop 

"I am not in love with this passage through the Red 
Sea, for I have the weakness and infirmities of flesh and 
blood plentifully in me. And I have prayed with my 
Saviour, nt transiret calix iste, that this cup of red wine 
might pass from me. But if not, God's will, not mine, be 
done. And I shall most willingly drink of this cup, as 
deep as He pleases, and enter into this sea, yea, and pass 
through it, in the way that He shall lead me." 

So the speech began. Very much that the Archbishop 
was greatly concerned to say to the people of England I 
shall pass over. He was moved to show by many ex- 
amples that servants of God were very liable to suffer 
misrepresentation and persecution and death. He had 
a carefully prepared defense to offer for himself. But 
I am concerned here with nothing but his relations with 
God. So I pass on to the closing words. 

"But I have done. I forgive all the world, all and 
every of those bitter enemies which have persecuted me ; 
and humbly desire to be forgiven, of God first, and then 
of every man. And so I heartily desire you to join in 
prayer with me. 

"0 eternal God and merciful Father, look down upon 
me in mercy, in the riches and fulness of all Thy mercies. 
Look upon me, but not till Thou hast nailed my sins to 
the Cross of Christ, not till Thou hast bathed me in the 
blood of Christ, not till I have hid myself in the wounds of 
Christ; that so the punishment due unto my sins may 
pass over me. And since Thou art pleased to try me to 
the uttermost, I most humbly beseech Thee, give me now, 
in this great instant, full patience, proportionable com- 
for, and a heart ready to die for Thine honour, the King's 
happiness, and this Church's preservation. And my zeal 
to these (far from arrogancy be it spoken) is all the sin 
(human frailty excepted, and all the incidents thereto), 
which is yet known to me in this particular, for which I 
come now to suffer; I say, in this particular of treason. 
But otherwise, my sins are many and great : Lord, pardon 
them all, and those especially (whatever they are), which 
have drawn down this present judgment upon me. And 
when Thou hast given me strength to bear it, do with me 
as seems best in Thine own eves. Amen." 

Then followed the Lord's Prayer, and then he set him- 
self to die. So far we have seen his formal preparation, 



of Canterbury, and Martyr 29 

the things which he carefully arranged with himself be- 
forehand. The things which follow are more significant, 
because they are things unrehearsed. So many people 
had been allowed to get up on the scaffold that there was 
scant accommodation for the tragedy to be enacted there. 
The temper of the born manager of men, who could not 
abide to see anything botched, and was deeply accustomed 
to ordering people and scolding people, flashes out for 
a moment. "I thought there would have been an 
empty scaffold, that I might have had room to die." The 
complaint was felt to be just, and a space was cleared. 
Then there came a manifestation of that other side of the 
man, his tenderness for the poor and the unregarded, that 
had marked him all through his life. He saw broad 
chinks between the boards of the scaffold, and that some 
people had crowded in under the very place of the block. 
He would have these removed, or else have the crevices 
filled with saw-dust, "lest my innocent blood should fall 
upon the heads of the people." 

God gave the martyr a chance to show what spirit he 
was of, by sending an adversary at the last to catch him 
unaware. An Irishman, Sir John Clotworthy, a Puritan 
fanatic, of the type that is known to us under the name 
of "Orangeman," assailed him rudely to show before the 
crowd how little this ecclesiastic knew of true religion 
and divine grace, "What," he asked, "is the comfort- 
ablest saying which a dying man would have in his 
mouth?" "Cupio dissolvi et esse cum Christo," was the 
reply. It was a Latin version of "I desire to depart and 
to be with Christ"; but the martyr, with the flashing 
quickness of his mind still unabated at the age of seven- 
ty-one, seized on that word, ''dissolvi" ("to be taken to 
pieces") of the Latin Vulgate, so touchingly applicable to 
his departing. "That is a good desire," said the inquisi- 
tor, "but there must be a foundation for that divine as- 
surance." "No man can express it," was the quiet re- 
ply. "It is to be found within." The intruder was still 
urgent. "It is founded upon a word, nevertheless, and 
that word should be known." "That word," was the 
firm answer, — "That word is the knowledge of Jesus 
Christ and that alone." "But he saw that this was but 
an indecent interruption, and that there would be no end 
to the trouble," says the biographer, "and so he turned 



30 William Laud, Archbishop 

away from him to the executioner, as the gentler and dis- 
creeter person; and, putting some money into his hand, 
without the least distemper or change of countenance, he 
said, 'Here, honest-friend, God forgive thee, and do thine 
office upon me in mercy." Then did he go upon his knees, 
and the executioner said that he should give a sign for 
the blow to come; to which he answered, "I will, but first 
let me fit myself. ' ' ' 

Then the martyr knelt down to say his last prayer on 
earth. It was no artfully premeditated thing. A great 
theologian, like Laud, would never have allowed a written 
prayer to pass his criticism, in which the first sentences 
were addressed to the Divine Son, Jesus Christ, and the 
last with an unconscious change of the heart's attitude, to 
the Divine Father "for Jesus Christ's sake." It is the 
unveiling before us of a devout heart taken off its guard, 
in the utter simplicity of its most natural, untutored 
speech. 

"Lord, I am coming as fast as I can. I know I must 
pass through the shadow of death before I can come to 
see Thee. But it is but umbra m\orlis, a mere shadow of 
death, a little darkness upon nature; but thou by Thy 
merits and passion hast broken through the jaws of death. 
So, Lord, receive my soul, and have mercy upon me; and 
bless this kingdom with peace and plenty, and with 
brotherly love and charity, that there may not be this 
effusion of Christian blood amongst them for Jesus 
Christ His sake, if it be Thy will." 

"Then he bowed his head upon the block, 'down as 
upon a bed,' and prayed silently awhile." So says the 
biographer. "No man knows what it was he said in that 
last prayer. After that he said out loud, 'Lord, receive 
my soul,' which was the sign to the executioner, and at 
one blow he was beheaded." 

"Near the sword, near to God," is a saying of another 
martyr Bishop, Ignatius of Antioch in the second Chris- 
tian century. I think that it applies to the story of the 
death of William Laud. Different minds will weigh its de- 
tails with different results. For myself, I feel that this 
is one of those narratives where heaven is opened. We 
cannot see in ourselves, but it is our privilege to go down 
on our knees, and mark how the glory of the divine light 
falls on the face of one who sees the vision of God. 



of Canterbury, and Martyr 31 

II. Of Laud as a Statesman I really think that I have 
said the worst, when I have said that he believed in the 
Divine Eight of Kings. "What could be worse?" you 
will say. But let me remind you, hirst, that most of the 
best men of that age had been brought up to that belief, 
and, secondly, that in Laud's holding it had a true side 
to it. It is quite true that when God in His providence 
does allow a man to be an absolute monarch, God makes 
that man a trustee of his subjects' welfare. Laud made 
the mistake of supposing that God had no other scheme 
for the governmentof humanity, and that to try to abridge 
the royal power, and transfer the trust in large measure 
to an oligarchy of upper-class people, — the nobility, the 
gentry, and the rich tradespeople, — was a sin. Nobody, 
no, not even Hampden and Pym, dreamed of a day of uni- 
versal suffrage, of voters having neither property, nor 
education, nor character, and all that. If they had had 
such a vision set before them, they would have shrunk 
from it like Laud himself. As a matter of fact, also, the 
rival, the revolutionary, government that was actually set 
up in England by Laud's opponents, was so intolerably 
bad beyond the very worst of his, that it collapsed and 
was thrown off with loud rejoicings before twenty j^ears 
were out. Certainly Laud was trying to accomplish some- 
thing that would have been bad for England. Certainly 
he was too ready to trust to the chances of touching the 
conscience and educating the mind of an absolute king, 
and not trustful enough of the power of truth to make 
itself heard by people taken in handfuls. I only claim 
that he was not a fool, and that his opponents made a 
worse mess of governing than he did. Then I add that 
God, who holds the balances of history, and holds them 
true, brought out of Laud's defeat and his adversaries' 
victory and their rapid following overthrow, and many 
other such alternations, that healthful development of 
our mother land which neither the one party nor the 
other,* taken by themselves, were capable of forecasting 



* As showing that distrust of government by the people has not 
entirely disappeared from thoughtful minds, I quote the following 
from a paper on the late Lord Salisbury by M. Augustin Filon 
{Living Age, Jan. 4, 1896). He speaks of the phenomenon of a great 
people passing smoothly from aristocracy to democracy. "At first I 
thought it an admirable spectacle, but latterly a little doubt and un- 
certainty began to creep into my mind." He imagines old leaders dying 



32 William Laud, Archbishop 

or promoting. The subject tempts me, and I could write 
long upon it, but I forbear, and leave it with only a hint, 
but I do allow myself to hope that it may be an illumina- 
tive hint. 

III. And so I pass to Laud as a Churchman. It was 
the side of his development that Laud himself cared most 
for, and I venture to say that it is the side where he will 
eventually appear at his very best. 

The Information of the Church of England had been 
professedly a studious and careful return to the prin- 
ciples and belief and practice of the Catholic Church as 
it came from our Lord Jesus Christ and His first 
Apostles. Some of the Anglican leaders, notably Cran- 
mer, really meant this profession seriously. They 
studied Fathers and Councils profoundly, and allowed 
their minds to be guided seriously by what they found. 
Others did not mean much by such professions, did not 
study much from old sources, and when they met with 
anything from thence that they did not like, promptly 
threw it overboard, as rubbish unworthy of any serious 
consideration. It is never to be forgotten that the six- 
teenth century saw the rise of a new system of religious 
thought, of which whatever else may be said, this at least 
is certainly true, that no Christians had ever held it any- 
where in the course of the first thousand years of Chris- 
tian history. There is no historical trace of it among 
the Christians to whom the New Testament Scriptures 
were first given. If therefore those Scriptures meant 
such a system, the meaning was so deeply esoteric that it 
was known to no Christian persons for more than a 

and old policies failing, and the rise of a popular movement upsetting all 
the old traditions of government in England. "Would the starving have 
to minister to their own needs, and to create for themselves such 
laws as they should think good? I know democracy well; I have 
seen its work at close quarters in diverse countries. I believe in its 
needs and its sufferings, but / have small faith in its virtues, and 
still less in its intelligence." [Italics are mine.] That was Laud's idea 
of democracy. For myself, I believe that evolution is a truth, and 
not a trick. I hold that the great evolution of humanity has shown 
God's purpose to devolve the responsibility of government upon all 
men (and all women), except criminals and defectives. But I note 
that Laud had not seen enough of that evolution to be responsible 
for discerning how the Finger of God pointed. Let it be remembered 
that in trying to remedy inequalities of taxation Laud was a states- 
man far ahead of his age. 



of Canterbury, and Martyr 33 

thousand years. This new system in religious thought, 
now known as Protestantism, came in from the continent 
in the particular form of Calvinism, and gained an im- 
mense hold upon English Christians. When Laud arose, 
with a profound conviction that the Christian religion 
of the first Christian centuries must be substantially the 
religion of Jesus Christ, — and I myself hold that idea to 
be axiomatic, — he found nearly the whole body of the 
Anglican clergy careless or Calvinist. Give him his due. 
He minded carelessness, laziness, and lowness of char- 
acter a good deal more than what he esteemed to be error 
in thought^ when judging of an individual. But he be- 
lieved that if Christ's own religion were to be saved in 
England, the Church of England must be brought back to 
the model of primitive antiquity in three points. 

(1) First, she must accept the constitution of the 
Church as divine, and as including government by 
Apostles, under whatever name, the existence of a min- 
isterial priesthood, and the transmission of gifts of sacer- 
dotal power, as well as of authority, by Apostles alone. 

(2) Second, she must hold to the original Christian 
conception of the Sacraments, as divinely ordered means 
of grace. 

(3) Third, in pursuance of this last idea, she must 
order her religious services and the furnishing of her 
churches (the very building itself being of a sacramental 
order), so as to impress, rather than conceal or contra- 
dict, the sacramental idea. 

These were principles of the Primitive Church. They 
were principles of the Anglican Reformation in its great 
official pronouncements. The Church of England was 
actually drifting fast away from them, when Laud was 
raised up as an instrument, and an effectual instrument, 
for her salvation. 

I cannot go into details at all, nor show you what 
serious and shaping consequences to the English-speak- 
ing world were involved in that seemingly trivial struggle 
to restore the Altar to a place and a condition of sacred- 
ness in English churches. Laud felt keenly the close 
connection between the outward and the inward. "The 
Romanists," he writes, "have been apt to say, the houses 
of God could not be suffered to lie so nastily, as in some 
places they have done, were the true worship of God ob- 



34 William Laud, Akchbishop 

served in them, or did the people think that such it were. 
It is true the inward worship of the heart is the great 
service of God, and no service acceptable without it ; but 
the external worship of God in His church is the great 
witness to the world that our heart stands right in that 
service of God." A quaint illustration of the same idea 
he gave, with sudden wit, in a Visitation of the Church of 
St. Peter, Cornhill, in London. The preacher had dis- 
coursed of the painfulness of a faithful ministry, in- 
stancing the popular derivation of Diakonos (from 
Konos), "one who runs through the dust" on his master's 
errand. The church, one of the distinguished and well- 
endowed churches of London, was seen to be "ill-re- 
paired without, and slovenly kept within." The bishop 
delivered a charge to his clergy after service, with this 
extemporaneous addition, — "I am sorry to meet here 
with so true an etymology of diaconus, for here is both 
dust and dirt for a deacon (or a priest either) to work 
in ; yea, it is dust of the worst kind, caused from the ruins 
of this ancient house of God, so that it pitieth His serv- 
ants to see her in the dust." * 

It would be unjust, too, not to mention his zeal for the 
restoration of unity to. the Church of Christ, and his 
largeness, rare in that age, in viewing that subject. "I 
cannot but wonder," he says in a sermon at the opening 
of Parliament, "what words St. Paul, were he now alive, 
would use, to call back unity into dismembered Christen- 
dom. For my part, death were easier to me than to see 
the face of the Church of Christ scratched and torn till 
it bleeds in every part, as it doth this day; and the coat 
of Christ, which one was spared by soldiers because it 
was seamless, rent everyway, and which is the misery of 

it, by the hand of the priest Good God ! What 

preposterous thrift is this in men, to sew up every small 
rent in their own coat, and not care what rents they not 
only suffer, but make, in the coat of Christ? What is it? 
Is Christ only thought fit to wear a torn garment? Or 
can we think that the Spirit of unity, which is one with 
Christ, will not depart to seek warmer clothing? Or, if 
He be not gone already, why is there not unity, which is 
wherever He is? Or, if He but gone from other parts of 



* This story is given by Fuller, Church History of Britain, VI., 303. 



or Canterbury, and Martyr 35 

Christendom, in any case, for the Passion, and in the 
Bowels of Jesus Christ, I beg it, make stay of Him here 
in our parts. ' ' " The Catholic Church of Christ, ' ' he says 
again, "is neither Eome nor a conventicle. Out of that 
there is no salvation, I easily confess it. But out of Rome 
there is, and out of a conventicle too ; salvation is not shut 
up into such a narrow conclave. In this ensuing dis- 
course, therefore, I have endeavored to lay open those 
wider gates of the Catholic Church confined to no age, 
time, or place; nor knowing any bounds but that faith 
which was once' — and but once for all — 'delivered to the 
saints.' " Laud was a High-Churchman. He was also 
large. 

The charge of a tendency to Romanism in himself, or 
to make Romanists of others, is to a scholar almost too 
absurd for mention. Protestants are apt to think that a 
genuine Anglicanism must be a position of unstable 
equilibrium, constantly leaning, often tottering, many 
times falling, Romeward. Let me point to one good tell- 
ing fact. I will give as my authority an article by Mr. 
Gladstone on The Evangelical Movement ; its Parentage, 
Progress, and Issue, in the British Quarterly Revieiv for 
July, 1879. The main secessions from England to Rome 
in the period between 1840 and 1860 were almost without 
exception from among Low Churchmen, from men 
brought up in unmitigated Protestantism. The noted 
men, Newman, Manning, the Wilberforces, and such, were 
all of that training. The sons of the old High Church 
families, — Pusey, the Kebles, the Mozleys, and many 
more, — stood their ground to a man.* And the presence 



* Mr. Gladstone speaks of a pamphlet enumerating three thou- 
sand seceders. Some of these, he says, "were persons brought for 
the first time under strong religious influences. Some cases may have 
been due to personal idiosyncrasies; some to a strong reaction from 
pure unbelief; some came from Presbyterianism; the merest handful 
from Nonconformity, or on the other side, from the old-fashioned 
Anglican precinct, represented by men like Archbishop Howley, 
Bishop Blomfield, or Dr. Hook. Very many, and especially among 
women, made the change through what may be called pious appetite, 
without extended knowledge or careful inquiry. But there was a 
large and still, more, an important class, not included within any of 
these descriptions; principally clerical, but not without a lay fraction, 
made up of men competent in every way by talent, attainment, posi- 
tion, character, to exercise a judgment They draw scores, aye, 

hundreds of others in their train; and of all these leaders it must 



36 William Laud, Archbishop 

of that sturdy element in the Church of England is due 
to Laud. It marks his life a success. It is his triumph. 

"That we have our Prayer Book," says Canon Moz- 
ley, "our Altar, even our Episcopacy itself, we may, 

humanly speaking, thank Laud That our 

Articles have not a Genevan sense tied to them and are 
not an intolerable burden to the Church, is due to Laud. 

Laud saved the English Church 

The English Church in her Catholic aspect is a memorial 
to Laud." 

So in Mr. Gladstone's notable Romanes Lecture, de- 
livered before Oxford University in October, 1892, having 
remarked that "Of Laud as a Churchman it ought to have 
been remembered, at least in extenuation, that he was the 
first Primate of All England in many generations who 
proved himself by his acts to be a tolerant theologian," 
Mr. Gladstone emphasized the fact that "After obtain- 
ing hold of the helm, he gave to the Anglican polity and 
worship what was in the main the impress of his own 
mind; that though he sank to the ground in the conflict 
of the times, which he had much helped to exasperate," 
yet "his scheme of Church polity, for his it largely was, 
grew up afresh out of his tomb, and took effect in law at 
the Restoration. 

"Laud as a Churchman has lasted. He lives to-day. 
His opponents have mostly disappeared from off the 
earth. They have left consequences, but no representa- 
tives. Laud has both." 

be said that, as they proceeded from Oxford (so to speak) to Rome, 
so they had already marched from Clapham to Oxford." 

I may add my testimony that of the men and women of whom I 
have had personal knowledge, who have gone from our Communion 
to the Roman, every one was brought up in non-Episcopalian Protes- 
tantism, or in the atmosphere of the Low Church Party. 



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